by Carl Dennis
To their favorite flavor or risk a new one?
It’s a balmy night in western New York, in May,
Under the lights of Elmwood, which are too bright
For the stars to be visible as they pour down on my head
Their endless starry virtues. Nothing confines me.
Why you felt our town closing in, why here
You could never become whoever you wished to be,
Isn’t easy to understand, but I’m trying.
Tomorrow I may ask myself again if my staying
Is a sign of greater enlightenment or smaller ambition.
But this evening, pausing by the window of Elmwood Liquors,
I want to applaud the prize-winning upstate Vouvray,
The equal of its kind in Europe, the sign says.
No time for a glass on your search
As you steer under stars too far to be friendly
Toward the island where True Beauty, the Princess,
Languishes as a prisoner. I can see you at the tiller
Squinting through spume, hoping your charts are accurate,
Hoping she can guess you’re on your way.
Invitation
This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play
At Jackson Park Middle School
8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947.
Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare
And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio
With scenery from Miss Ferguson’s art class.
A lot of effort has gone into it.
Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school
Week after week with their teachers
Just to prepare for this one evening,
A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual.
Even if you’ve moved away, you’ll want to return.
Jackson Park, in case you’ve forgotten, stands
At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill.
Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition.
This is the play for you if you’ve been tempted
To claw your way to the top. If you haven’t been,
It should make you feel grateful.
Just allow time to get lost before arriving.
So many roads are ready to take you forward
Into the empty world to come, misty with promises.
So few will lead you back to what you’ve missed.
Just get an early start.
Call in sick to the office this once.
Postpone your vacation a day or two.
Prepare to find the road neglected,
The street signs rusted, the school dark,
The doors locked, the windows broken.
This is where the challenge comes in.
Do you suppose our country would have been settled
If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?
Somewhere the students are speaking the lines
You can’t remember. Somewhere, days before that,
This invitation went out, this one you’re reading
On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk
Piled beside you. Forget about your passport.
You don’t need to go to Paris just yet.
Europe will seem even more beautiful
Once you complete the journey you begin today.
No Shame
No shame if you choose in the end
To be buried like an ancient Roman,
At the roadside,
The stone above you crowded with inscription,
Calling the passersby to pause
And read how you served the state,
How the scales of your butcher shop always read true,
How you cared for your small plot, a pious farmer.
No shame to hope for some visitors
Though maybe in life you grew accustomed to solitude,
Content to defend the good
As you spoke in the courtroom
Over the heads of the crowd
To the gods you imagined, who loved perfection.
Having proved you could live alone,
You can reach out in death to others
As the Romans did, with a few true phrases,
Learned early or late.
You who pass by, don’t rely on doctors.
They’re the ones who brought me here.
Reader of stones, if you’re rich
Don’t live meanly, as I did,
And stint on feast days.
Travelers, if you’re poor, master one skill
So in one thing you can feel superior
And accept without shame,
When the time comes, the help of others.
Lying under your stone,
A coin of the realm over each eye,
The fee for Charon’s ferry still unspent,
You’ll pause in the endless review of memory
And the endless dream of returning
With a disposition that’s more agreeable
And listen to the traffic of carts and chariots,
Mule shoes and horseshoes, sandals and clogs.
The few who pause above you
Will be just the ones most open to suggestions.
Their prayers haven’t been answered.
Their best schemes have failed them.
Now they bend to read your conclusions.
No shame to teach in a roadside school
Students willing to learn from anyone.
from Ranking the Wishes (1997)
Loss
Just because your cousins perjured themselves
On the stand to steal the house you inherited
And have settled in, and are filling the rooms
With furniture your aunt would have hated,
Doesn’t mean they’re getting away with it.
Just because their lights will now burn late
In the house you love, and the sound of their dancing
Will be heard in the street, their drums and trumpets
At birthday parties, graduations, and weddings,
Doesn’t mean they’re not paying the penalty,
Living lesser lives than they might have lived,
Possessing lesser amounts of comeliness.
And if they’re not aware of the loss,
Couldn’t that show how shrunken their spirits are,
How you wouldn’t want to be them as they fall asleep
At the end of a day they regard as perfect?
Of course it’s hard not to wish them ill,
A pain that even their thicker souls can feel.
But that won’t widen your cramped apartment.
That won’t give you the spacious, airy life you admire
With windows opening out on the horizon.
Pity them if you can’t forget them.
And if that’s too hard for now, pity the house.
Think how it’s losing out on the care
You’d have bestowed on it, on the loyalty
You’d have shown to its style and character,
Not to your fancy, a distinction too fine
For the new owners to handle.
Be like those angels said to enjoy the earth
As a summer retreat before man entered the picture,
Staggering under his sack of boundary stones.
They didn’t mutter curses as they fastened their wings
And rose in widening farewell circles.
They grieved for the garden growing smaller below them,
Soon to exist only as a story
That every day grows harder to believe.
Pendulum
If I sleep through the moment just before dawn
When the pendulum of the day reaches the top
Of its swing and pauses, I can catch the other pause
At dusk, when the street outside the window
Appears suspended, lifted from its surroundings
And held motionless, and I
’m able to ask
Why these particular houses have been selected
To compose my world, and why now,
When my soul feels fluid,
Kin to everyone who has ever lived here
From the time of the earliest settler till today.
A puff of wind in the snowball bush at the curb.
A puff over the waist-high, shaggy grass
Rolling away from the farmhouse in all directions
As a woman steps out on the porch in dusky light
To ring the bell. Just as she reaches up
To summon her son and husband from the barn
The pendulum of the day reaches its pausing point
And her gaze grows tentative and confused.
What is this place to her, this endless prairie,
This wilderness fit for a soul that asks to be lonely
Under a boundless sky, which she never asked for
Or only in one of her many moods.
Hasn’t she dreamed for two nights running
Of a woman walking home from the opera
Through the streets of Paris, humming a theme?
Two women playing their parts in separate dramas
Or one woman divided. That’s the issue for her
As she watches the grass from the porch
Billow and bend while time’s suspended.
The wind crosses the prairie, skirts the woods,
And shakes the snowball bush at the curb
Across from the self-same row of houses,
Motionless and unyielding, blocking my vista.
And then her hand tightens on the rope
And the pendulum, poised, starts on its downswing
As the bell sounds, and the day parts
Soundlessly like the grass to let us in.
Days of Heaven
That was a great compliment the Greeks paid to human life
When they imagined their gods living as humans do,
With the same pleasure in love and feasting,
Headstrong as we are, turbulent, quick to anger,
Slow to forgive. Just like us, only immortal.
And now that those gods have proven mortal too
And heaven and earth can’t be divided,
Every death means a divine occasion
Has been taken from us, a divine perspective,
Though the loss gets only a line or two in the news.
Hard to believe the headlines this morning
That a banker on Mt. Olympus has been pilfering,
That a builder has been guilty of shoddy construction
On a bridge that spans a river in heaven,
Cutting corners to squirrel away his fortune
For a better day, when the great day has already come.
For news that heartens we must turn to the classifieds.
Here in what’s left of heaven it’s right to advertise
For a soul mate. It’s right to look for a job
That lets us incarnate spirit more fully
And leave something behind that time is kinder to
Than the flesh of gods. Lucky there’s work.
Lucky the streets of heaven are in need of repair.
Paint is peeling from the dream-house trim.
Holy rainwater backs up in leaf-clogged gutters
Till the ceiling sags and tiles need regrouting.
And look at the list of practical items for sale—
Used snowblowers, croquet sets, chainlink fencing.
And what about a wooden canoe with two paddles.
Why don’t we make time for a turn before sundown?
Out on the broad lake a breeze will find us
That’s wafted around the planet to cool our divinity.
The clouds will hover above us in a giant halo
As we watch our brother, the sun, descend,
His gentle face turned toward us, his godly expression
Undarkened by accusation or disappointment
Or the thought of something he’s left undone.
To Reason
I hope I never speak ill of you,
Dependable homely friend who prods me gently
To turn to the hour that’s now arriving,
Not to the hour I let slip by
Twenty years back. No way now, you say,
To welcome a friend I failed to welcome
When she returned to town in sorrow,
Fresh from her discovery that the man
Who seemed to outshine all the others
Could also cast the densest shade.
You’re right to label it magical thinking
When I say to a phantom what I never said
To flesh and blood, as if the words, repeated enough,
Could somehow work their way back to an old page
And nudge the silence aside and settle in, a delusion
Not appropriate for a man no longer young
At the end of a century where many nations
Have set many things in motion they can’t call back
Though the vote for reversal is unanimous.
I’m glad you ask, clear-sighted Reason,
Before what audience, if my speech can’t reach her ears,
I imagine myself performing. Who is it
I want to convince I’d do things differently
This time around if the chance were offered.
You’re right to say that half an hour a day is enough
For these gods or angels to get the point
If they’re ever gong to get it, which is doubtful.
Right again that if part of myself
After all my efforts still needs convincing
I should leave that dullard behind
With the empty dream of wholeness and move on.
I should move along the road that is not the road
I’d be moving along had I said what I didn’t say
To someone who might have been ready to listen,
But a road as good, you assure me, Reason,
One that might lead to a life I can be proud of
So the man I might have been can’t pity me.
Thanks for contending I can solve the problems
He may have wanted to solve but hadn’t the time for,
Preoccupied as he was with another life,
The one I too might be caught up in
Had I heard the words you now speak clearly
Just as clearly long ago.
Cedar Point
The woman who cooked her heart out at Cedar Point
High in the Adirondacks wouldn’t have minded so much
When nobody came to the kitchen to praise her work
If she’d believed her work recorded by a watchful heaven.
Sad that a faith like that was denied her,
That she lived in a skeptical, fretful era
Not rich in serious witnesses. The guests at Cedar Point,
Lacking either the taste required or the concentration,
Bolted dessert in their rush to get back to the lake
For an evening sail or ramble or bingo game.
In an age of faith the joy of achievement
Would have been enough, and she needn’t have dreamed
Of consuming in vengeance a feast intended for fifty
All by herself while the guests ate crackers.
Just herself at the table with her one friend, Cindy,
The young, willowy waitress who never smiled,
Who was bullied all day by the manager
With his no-nonsense lantern jaw and raspy voice.
In an age of faith Cindy might have believed
Her sorrow recorded in a heavenly ledger,
But in the age she lived in only the helpless cook
Looked on with concern and maybe the gentle boy
At table seven, who asked her questions.
As for the faith of the boy, he could imagine a potion
That Cindy’s stepmother,
desperate for youth,
Received for abandoning Cindy to the manager,
But not a potion to make a boy of eleven
A knight by summer’s end, a deliverer.
And now, forty years later, when the cook
Has long since sweated her last in the thankless kitchen,
The whole burden of witnessing falls on him.
Even the woman that Cindy’s become
Might not remember, sixty years old at least
If still alive, retired to Florida for all he knows,
Carting her grandchildren to baseball practice
While her husband, sporty in cleats and cap,
Tees off with his chums. No witness left
But a man who admits he has no answers
As he asks how to save Cindy the Beautiful
Still stranded in her attic room,
Ironing the uniform of her prison
Or lugging the heavy trays
From the steamy kitchen without a smile,
Not expecting her luck to change.
The Great Day
What if the great day never comes
And your life doesn’t shine with vivid blossoms,
Just with the usual pale variety?
What if the best china never seems called for,
Those dishes reserved for the friends you love the most
On the day they return from their endless travels?
To use them now, for the only occasions available,
Would be to confuse the high realm with the low.
But not to use them, doesn’t that seem wrong too,
To leave the best wine undrunk in the cellar
For the next owner of your house to open?
What then? Can you will yourself to see a common day
The way a saint might see it, as a gift from heaven,
Or the way it appears from the window of the hospital
On the first morning the patient feels strong enough
To edge across the room and look out?
There on the street an angel policeman
Is directing the flashing mosaic of traffic.
Or can you see the day as the dead might see it,